What do you want to do with your life?

The chart … shows an almost ghostly parallel: adjusted for inflation, UC tuition has gone up 5x since 1980. During the same period, spending on corrections has also gone up 5x. As we spend ever more on warehousing prisoners, we’re forced to make students pay ever more for their education. The two lines track almost exactly.

We used to have the world’s greatest system of higher education and we thrived. Now we have the world’s biggest system of penal institutions and we’re broke. That’s the decision Californians have made over the past 30 years: more prisons and better paid prison guards, but lower taxes and less education. (And not just higher education, either.) It’s hard to think of a stupider allocation of resources. But hey — at least our property taxes are capped! Hooray!

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11 comments

Call me an optimist, but I would like to learn more about what happened in (looks like somewhere around 95? This graph is somewhat hard to read) when tuition dipped. What went right then that could potentially be replicated in the future?

Sadly, it appears that the generations that benefitted most from the state investment in education (including mine), have turned out to be incredibly selfish, and unwilling to give the next generations the benefits our elders gave us. I don’t see any real change until a younger, less-white generation of voters starts paying attention and returns the state to its former, more progressive course.

Californians have made plenty of stupid decisions, some of them unique to California. But the stupid decision to dramatically expand the penal system seems to have been made simultaneously around the country. As late as the early ’70s, the US level of incarceration was pretty typical of an industrialized democracy. Thereafter it became dramatically higher. And of course that’s expensive. Has any state bucked this trend?

I really can’t get my head around a 32% increase in *this* economy. I know its basically the only solution, but the obvious question is: what next?

I’m viewing California from the opposite extreme on the continental USA, and our state is going through a mid-cycle budget recession of tremendous proportions. Higher ed is going to be hit very, very hard. But here’s the problem: what’s the solution for next year (fiscal 2011, starting July 1, 2010) or 2012? The budgeting scenarios I’ve seen discussed are incredibly pie-in-the-sky in terms of revenue generation. If those forecasts don’t materialize (and you can see how devastated New York State was by such poor forecasting), then the whole thing just goes off the cliff…. Again…. And again….

Can you raise tuition 32% for three straight years?

It seems like the stimulus simply extended the plank out over the canyon, but pretty soon we’re going to actually see a true, definitional depression. It’ll be like the 1930s, with depression scrip showing up everywhere….

I hereby rescind all my tuition complaints for my time (’83-’87) at UCSD. I didn’t realize at the time how bad the next generation would have it.

I mostly worked my way through college and graduated with minimal student loans. (~$2500) It was hard then, and only possible through well paying engineering jobs. That’s just not possible now, from what I can see. That’s incredibly sad. We’re saddling people with massive debt before they even enter the workforce.

sburnap, i also worked through school and graduated college with very little in loans, and graduated law school at UC hastings in ’82 with a manageable amount to be paid off over 10 years. [at something ridiculous like 3% interest.] that is not possible now.

stevenattewell: I’m just spitballing, but maybe prison funding is pegged to a tax somehow proportional to statewide incomes, whereas student fees are a set amount. If the regents at the time were reluctant to keep pegging fees to inflation, there would have been a divergence in real dollars. If the income gains of the dot-com bubble were concentrated into a relatively small slice of the CA populace, and the regents were of good conscience, I can imagine such a situation.

Then again, I’m just making something up. It would be interesting to see that graph with annual plotted points.